our worst selves

I just finished listening to the audio version of The Diary of Anne Frank.  I have a few thoughts on this, but I'll address the one that strikes me the most in this post.  That is that our perceptions of others is almost always inaccurate.  I'm not even taking this from the obvious direction of the fact that people thought wrongly of the Jews.  I was affected by a completely different manifestation of this in the book.

Ms. Frank apparently wrote her diary with the idea that it would one day be used as documentation of the life she and others lived during the German occupation.  This was brilliant of her, but it also establishes that this is not just any teen-aged girl's diary.  This is the diary of someone who is writing thoughts that she on some level expects to be broadcast to others.  Given this, her clashes with others in the annex where she hid are fascinating.  She probably expected those she wrote about to eventually discover what she was writing.  What she thought the end result of that discovery would be is beyond me, but that reality had to be known to her.

Once or twice she has a deep conflict with her mother, but the person she seemed to constantly be irritated with was the matriarch of another family in the annex.  In the book, this woman is named Mrs. van Daan, but her real name was apparently Auguste van Pels.  To me, the clashes sounded driven by personality and generational differences between Ms. Frank and Mrs. van Daan.

It's easy to take Anne's side when she complains about how intolerable Mrs. Van Daan is.  She is the one who gets to tell her side of the story, after all.  Having concluded the book and learned that only one person who hid in the annex survived Nazi captivity, though, has given me pause and empathy for all of its inhabitants, including Mrs. van Daan.  It has also caused me to wonder how I would be portrayed in such a work.

Can I imagine being trapped in a poorly ventilated annex with seven other people and minimal privacy for two years without coming a bit unhinged?  Can I imagine the constant stress of potentially being captured, and slowly going further and further into poverty (There is a poignant situation recorded in the diary where Mrs. van Daan has to sell her prized fur coat so that they can continue to make ends meet.)?  I am sure that there would be multiple instances of my having said or done things that would appear indefensible.  Then, to have those recorded for posterity as the most noteworthy description of my life and character would be difficult to bear.  I don't want to pretend that dying at the hands of the Nazis was in any way a good thing, but it is a minor mercy that Mrs. van Pels never learned of her future notoriety.

This sort of thing actually comes up a lot today.  Someone will be filmed saying or doing something that is objectively wrong, then they are punished in an out-of-proportion fashion through a viral video or social media post.  Sometimes it's even for things that aren't objectively wrong, but are just violations of social norms.  An example of this showed up in a news story a few weeks back about someone who was caught shaving on a train (below).


Objective wrongs should be corrected, but people's lives shouldn't be destroyed in the process; and they should certainly not be destroyed over minor social rule violations.

That I am saying this isn't to imply that I'm better than those who share such viral things.  I'm as likely to laugh and click share.  I'm as prone as anyone to seek righteous comeuppance through online mob justice.  My primary point is that I'm trying to do my best not to be part of the problem when I'm online, and I'd encourage anyone reading this to take conscious steps to do the same.